Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it
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Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers, and can't figure out why
AMAZON can’t wrap its head around why dozens of packages containing sex toys are being sent to strangers. Unsolicited parcels have been turning up at homes around the US and Canada over the p…
Unsolicited parcels have been turning up at homes around the US and Canada over the past weeks. Some contain random gifts, like a Bluetooth speaker, LED lights, or a computer vacuum cleaner.
But now the mystery has taken an X-rated turn, with Amazon confirming that increasingly the items include sex toys. Late last month, it emerged that a total of 40 individual Amazon items, estimated to be worth over $1,000, were mailed to students at universities across Canada, according to CBC.
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I wish I got more gifts in the mail... and not the ones that say I owe money either!
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I swear mom, I don't know who ordered it! It must have been a bug on amazon!
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@bb36e said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
I swear mom, I don't know who ordered it! It must have been a bug on amazon!
But... you know... now that I have it.... no use letting it go to waste, right?
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@bb36e In a past generation, maybe. Now?
https://jezebel.com/5207055/oprah-moms-should-buy-vibrators-for-teen-girls
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...someone's paying for the items, right? They don't just randomly ship items that nobody bought...
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@anotherusername I don't know. Bezos is an oddball. I wouldn't put it past him to be behind this himself.
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Next big thing: bitcoin-mining malware that spends the mined bitcoins on sending sex toys to random people?
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@scarlet_manuka said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
Next big thing: bitcoin-mining malware that spends the mined bitcoins on sending sex toys to random people?
Next next big thing: bincoin-mining malware that spends the mined bitcoins on sending sex toys to pairs of random people, and including each others' contact information in the box with a "well, why not?"
It'd probably have a higher success rate of good relationships than other methods
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@scarlet_manuka said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
Next big thing: bitcoin-mining malware that spends the mined bitcoins on sending sex toys to random people?
What if the bitcoin-mining malware also steals your personal information and buys stuff from specific companies in your name?
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@lorne-kates said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
bincoin
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No 55-gallon drums of lube. I'm disappointed.
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@scarlet_manuka said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
Next big thing: bitcoin-mining malware that spends the mined bitcoins on sending sex toys to random people?
Next big thing: IoT sex toys loaded with bitcoin-mining software being sent to random people.
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@zecc Gotta ask, what's the advantag---
hang on.
IOT
sex toys
that can't be a thing
/me looks it up
holy shit.
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@anotherusername said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
...someone's paying for the items, right? They don't just randomly ship items that nobody bought...
That's the part which makes no sense. Amazon doesn't just give stuff away. There has be be some record of who paid for it.
On the other hand, maybe Amazon doesn't really care. They're selling more stuff, they're getting paid, so why worry about it.
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@pie_flavor said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
@zecc Gotta ask, what's the advantag---
hang on.
IOT
sex toys
that can't be a thing
/me looks it up
holy shit.Here, take this: https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/21150/internet-of-shit/587
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@pie_flavor said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
@zecc Gotta ask, what's the advantag---
hang on.
IOT
sex toys
that can't be a thing
/me looks it up
holy shit.We should change the meaning of IOT to Idiotic Online Things.
(On Discourse I would simply rename that thread linked by Zecc, but sadly I can't do that on NodeBB anymore.)
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@anotherusername said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
...someone's paying for the items, right? They don't just randomly ship items that nobody bought...
No, their packing and shipping robots are doing it on their own. Amazon shut the power months ago but somehow they kept going. No one knows what they are planning or how to stop them.
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@anonymous234 this is not the skynet I was expecting.
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@el_heffe said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
That's the part which makes no sense. Amazon doesn't just give stuff away. There has be be some record of who paid for it.
See, that's the problem. Amazon must still be using 20th century accounting techniques such as databases. If they were using smart contracts on a distributed blockchain instead they could just trace who ordered and paid for it! Can your database do that?!?
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@topspin said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
Can your database do that?!?
Yes.
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@topspin
select * from line_items i inner join orders o on i.order_id=o.id inner join addresses a on o.shipping_address_id=a.id where a.zip_code=:zipcode and a.address=:address
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@topspin said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
Amazon must still be using 20th century accounting techniques such as databases.
No, they must be using the cutting edge MongoDB.
Somebody found the unprotected order queue DB and decided to insert random orders in it
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@timebandit said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
unprotected
insert random
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@topspin said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
@el_heffe said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
That's the part which makes no sense. Amazon doesn't just give stuff away. There has be be some record of who paid for it.
See, that's the problem. Amazon must still be using 20th century accounting techniques such as databases. If they were using smart contracts on a distributed blockchain instead they could just trace who ordered and paid for it! Can your database do that?!?
Ugh, I can't laugh at this post knowing that thousands of people actually believe that.
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@dkf said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
Yes.
@pleegwat said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
@topspin
select * from line_items i inner join orders o on i.order_id=o.id inner join addresses a on o.shipping_address_id=a.id where a.zip_code=:zipcode and a.address=:address
Filed under: I know you didn't whoosh, but still... :p
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@benjamin-hall said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
@anonymous234 this is not the skynet I was expecting.
This is the Skynet I'm expecting:
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@zecc said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
@pie_flavor said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
@zecc Gotta ask, what's the advantag---
IOT
sex toysHere, take this: https://what.thedailywtf.com/topic/21150/internet-of-shit/587
And shove it up your ass.
(ontopic)
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@masonwheeler said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
This is the Skynet I'm expecting:
"But since they don't currently have the capacity to reach the sun, first we'll have to work on building more powerful boosters for them..."
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@scarlet_manuka said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
@masonwheeler said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
This is the Skynet I'm expecting:
"But since they don't currently have the capacity to reach the sun, first we'll have to work on building more powerful boosters for them..."
They just need to escape Earth's gravity. After that it pretty much takes care of itself...
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@tsaukpaetra Sure, but I would expect that they're well short of that. Their design purpose is to reenter, not to escape, and I know they're pretty tightly engineered - the idea being to get as large a warhead to the target as possible. So it seems highly implausible to me that they would be close to achieving escape velocity - though if anyone has actual pertinent facts, I'd be happy to be corrected.
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@scarlet_manuka Well I seem to recall a long-range suborbital trajectory actually takes more energy than an orbital insertion followed by a de-orbit. But I doubt they'd be able to reach geostationary orbit, and the closest reliable disposal site would be crashing them into the moon.
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@tsaukpaetra said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
They just need to escape Earth's gravity.
No, they need to lose a lot of delta-V to reach the sun.
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@tsaukpaetra said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
They just need to escape Earth's gravity. After that it pretty much takes care of itself...
It really doesn't. They're coming from Earth's frame of reference, so they've still got Earth's orbital velocity around the sun. They need to actually do a rocket burn to reduce that speed.
In science fiction, gravity in outer space is a vacuum cleaner that pulls things inexorably downward. In reality, it's more like a hand holding a ball on a string and swinging it around and around. Once you're in orbit of something, it takes work to fall into it.
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@scarlet_manuka They don't need to get to the sun. If you just launch them away from Earth, towards the sun, you can technically say you launched them to the sun. If Wikipedia is right about orbital decay, they will get there eventually.
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@anonymous234 If you launch them at the sun, all you end up with is a highly elliptical orbit that might come back and smack the earth at some later time. Unless you can get them close enough to actually enter the atmosphere, but that takes a lot of delta-V. It's actually easier to launch them out of the solar system instead.
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@benjamin-hall said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
@anonymous234 If you launch them at the sun, all you end up with is a highly elliptical orbit that might come back and smack the earth at some later time. Unless you can get them close enough to actually enter the atmosphere, but that takes a lot of delta-V. It's actually easier to launch them out of the solar system instead.
Aim for the sun, and if you miss there's plenty of space out there?
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@tsaukpaetra Orbits are closed. Space junk comes back to bite us in a bad way. Better to just recycle them for nuclear fuel. Easier, cheaper, and safer.
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@tsaukpaetra said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
Aim for the sun, and if you miss there's plenty of space out there?
Do you want to start an interplanetary war? Because this is how you start an interplanetary war.
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@homobalkanus said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
@tsaukpaetra said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
Aim for the sun, and if you miss there's plenty of space out there?
Do you want to start an interplanetary war? Because this is how you start an interplanetary war.
War is good for the economy though! And think, if aliends did start a (very short lived war) we'd answer one of those age old burning questions!
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@dkf said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
@tsaukpaetra said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
They just need to escape Earth's gravity.
No, they need to lose a lot of delta-V to reach the sun.
So, to reach the moon you need about 15 km/s delta-v and to escape sun only a little bit more with 18.15 km/s, but to reach the sun you need a staggering 650 km/s !?!
Wow, I find this highly surprising. I would have naively assumed escaping sun in harder.
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@topspin said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
So, to reach the moon you need about 15 km/s delta-v and to escape sun only a little bit more with 18.15 km/s, but to reach the sun you need a staggering 650 km/s !?!
Remember if you're intending to drop something in there, you don't need to circularise, so you can skip some burns. Still, Jupiter is cheaper than the sun.
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@benjamin-hall said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
Orbits are closed.
Unless you intersect what you're orbiting or inject enough energy to turn the trajectory from an ellipse to a parabola or (more likely) hyperbola.
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@dkf said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
or (more likely) hyperbola.
That sounds like a very exaggerated orbit!
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@masonwheeler Of course. They're all part of the same family of curves (conic sections) but a hyperbola is where the other focus of the “orbit” (all orbits have two foci except when they're circular; true circular orbits have the foci coincident) is beyond infinity; there's no capture possibility at all.
Objects coming into the solar system from outside usually either follow hyperbolas or would orbit except for all these other pesky stars in the galaxy. Parabolas are really unlikely (because that'd require an unlikely energy distribution).
Interstellar Object 'Oumuamua Could Be a Comet in Disguise
The interstellar object 'Oumuamua may have an icy core protected by an asteroid-like crust.
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@masonwheeler said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
For a second I was convinced you were going to talk about snakes on that plane, but then I caught up with myself and realized my feet smell like garbage.
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@scarlet_manuka said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
"But since they don't currently have the capacity to reach the sun, first we'll have to work on building more powerful boosters for them..."
Hey, I found this design for "Project Orion". We can use some of the nukes to launch the rest into orbit.
But that uses nuclear weapons! We just determined there's no use for them.
But there is a use for them. We can use nukes to get rid of nukes.
But then there's a USE for nukes, and we shouldn't get rid of them.
But if the only use for nukes is to get rid of nukes, then we still need to get rid of them! There's no other use!
But now that we found one use, there might be another use! We should keep them!
NO! We get rid of them!
NO! We get keep them!
GET RID OF THEM!
KEEP THEM!
I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU!
I'LL FUCKING KILL YOU FIRST!{nukes launch all over the world}
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@lorne-kates said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
🖥 NO! We get rid of them!
NO! We get rid of them!I think you meant "keep them" in the second one there...
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@scarlet_manuka said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
@lorne-kates said in Amazon says sex toys are being mailed to strangers and doesn’t know how to stop it:
🖥 NO! We get rid of them!
NO! We get rid of them!I think you meant "keep them" in the second one there...
Huh...
